My teaching method combines my industry experience as a media planner and buyer at advertising agencies with my academic training as a media theorist and critic. My teaching philosophy, “critical industry pedagogy,” centers student engagement with media technologies, institutions, aesthetics, and audiences from practical and theoretical standpoints. In my courses, students learn to think and write about media from positions outside scholarship, like those of technology journalists, film/television reviewers, advertising professionals, fans, directors, and screenwriters. When practicing this method, students succeed in taking the leap from more familiar forms of writing about media (e.g., news reports, reviews, screenplays, and blogs) to more foreign writing genres (e.g., media history and theory). Through critical industry pedagogy, students can apply their backgrounds with media content to course objectives. They leave the semester having learned how to think critically about media because of their simultaneous practice of media.
 
In “Television Studies,” a 17-person undergraduate seminar cross-listed in Duke’s Literature and Visual & Media Studies programs, students began by applying their insights from our week on digital television technologies to the production of technology reports. In these articles, students reported on newfangled TV technologies of their choice, like rollable TVs, and envisioned the products’ future influences on industry, politics, and culture. After our unit on television industries, students wore the hats of marketing executives and creatives, crafting advertising strategies and storyboards for 30-second commercials. The strategy recommended and justified a target audience for a client’s product, an ad placement on a specific network within a particular program, and a creative vision that would entice the target audience to purchase the product. The storyboardactivated that creative vision by composing six frames in which students narrated their ads and communicated the commercials’ audiovisual style. In the Writing 101 course “The Rom Com,” students co-authored romantic comedy scenes in small groups based on a screenplay template. After revising the scenes in small groups between classes, students performed “table reads” of the scenes for their peers. Across these three exercises, students succeeded in beginning to think analytically about television and film with reference to writing and representational genres—journalism, advertising, and screenwriting—more recognizable from their previous engagements with media. 
 
Critical industry pedagogy creates a foundation for students to advance successfully to academic genres of media criticism. When teaching the research essay, my approach embodies my training at the Thompson Writing Program, which emphasizes the practices of scaffolding assignments, peer review, and instructor conferences in the student writing process. In “Television Studies,” students strengthened their research abilities by completing a 3,000-word paper about an original topic in TV studies. Students crafted the paper step by step in collaboration with a peer reviewer studying a similar issue. Students began by formulating a research problem through the topic, question, and problem schema proposed by Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, and Joseph M. Williams in The Craft of Research. In conferences with their peer reviewers and the instructor, students gained substantial feedback that allowed them to revise and further specify their research problems. Across one student’s initial topic, question, problem exercise, revised exercise, and abstract, we can observe how the scaffolding, peer review, and conferencing tactics enabled vast improvements in the student’s writing and research. Next, through annotated bibliographies, students learned how to deconstruct scholars’ arguments by identifying the research problems, claims, applications of evidence, and scholarly stakes. Finally, students workshopped introductions and thesis statements with their peer reviewers in a final conference. The scaffolding approach distributed the assignment into smaller, more manageable parts. The emphasis on revision facilitated substantial improvement through peer feedback and instructor conferences. As a result of these strategies, students submitted final research papers that reflected their growth throughout the semester.
 
Students consistently remark on how enjoyable and educational this approach is. Students have described my assignments as “thoughtful,” “interesting,” “engaging,” and “easy to understand.” More specifically, a student from “The Rom Com” observed that the variety of assignments facilitated course engagement: 
 
Professor Beaver also did a really good job of changing up what we did in class and what our assignments were, and through each assignment I learned something different about how to be a better writer.
 
A student from “Television Studies” commented explicitly on how this course helped them approach a career in media:
 
I absolutely loved this course. I am interested in working in the entertainment industry after college, and the knowledge I've acquired in this class has exposed me to different aspects of television that I hadn't thought about while challenging me to think about shows that I enjoy beyond their pure entertainment value. Professor Beaver also gives very helpful feedback on writing, which will continue to benefit me for the remainder of my college career. 
 
In addition to critical industry pedagogy, I create an inclusive and affirmative environment in my courses by emphasizing the validity of students’ input. For example, I begin each semester with an informal exercise where students describe their media likes and dislikes, such as their favorite and least favorite TV series, rom-coms, or film/TV genres. Through this exercise, I learn more about my students, and my students learn more about each other. Equally important, through this exercise, I establish an intellectual environment where students’ analytic judgments are taken seriously, whether “positive” or “negative,” and where critique and ambivalence enable rather than inhibit knowledge. Speaking to the success of such an approach, one student wrote, 
 
This class is one of my favorites I have ever taken! Blake is super understanding, supportive, and helpful both in and out of the classroom. He created an inclusive and stress free classroom environment that is missing from many Duke classes. I felt unafraid to speak up and was always met with a smile by both Blake and my peers. 
 
In summary, my courses commence with trust-building exercises that establish the validity of students’ critical assessments. I then continue with critical industry pedagogy, in which students learn to write about media from the diverse perspectives of media professionals. In my seminars, a hybrid approach synthesizing media practice with media critique results in enthusiastic participation and a more dramatic arc of improvement in student composition. This foundation enables students to progress confidently to the research essay, in which they formulate an original question in media studies. Students enhance their essay writing through scaffolding, breaking an assignment into manageable parts with multiple instances of instructor feedback; peer review, improving one’s writing by editing a fellow student’s writing; and instructor conferences, offering opportunities for extended verbal feedback in a one-on-one setting.